DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE BEAUTY AND PERSONAL CARE INDUSTRY

EXPERT INSIGHTS

Lalitha subramanian > author >  Dassault Systèmes

Dr. Lalitha Subramanian

Strategic research and science expert:

Dr. Lalitha leads strategic research collaborations with different industries to solve scientific challenges using 3D modeling, simulation, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). For over 25 years, she has successfully delivered energy savings, enabled sustainable solutions, remediated product and process failures and driven product innovation for her customers. Such collaborations have resulted in awards. She has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from IIT (Chennai, India) and a post-doctorate from Cornell University with Prof. Roald Hoffmann (Nobel Laureate).

The Need for Digitalization

With a growing market size projected to reach USD716.6 billion by 2025, beauty and personal care companies need a digital makeover to get ahead and capitalize on growth opportunities. 
The three key drivers of digitalization in the industry today are: 

  1. The need for speed and efficiency to adapt to new market trends
  2. The call to merge beauty and health benefits for more holistic products
  3. The urgency to meet personalized demands sustainably and responsibly

In addition, assuring high quality and top performance through best practices calls for an enterprise-wide digital solution to optimize resources, improve efficiencies and drive business value at every level. ​​

Renowned expert, Dr. Lalitha Subramanian, a BIOVIA Science Fellow and Global Head of Outcome-Based Research at Dassault Systèmes, shares recent digital developments and innovation successes, including best practices by leading brands such as L’Oréal, L’Occitane Group and more.  

UNMASK THE DIGITAL EDGE

With digitalization, will companies perform better? Will it cost more? Most importantly, how does a digital platform help companies navigate industry challenges effectively? 

Choosing the right digital platform for your business is critical. The 3DEXPERIENCE® platform is one such platform constantly outperforming other platforms in delivering value. It provides a distinct ability to connect holistically across all systems, offering end-to-end visibility for efficient collaboration and marrying health science and engineering capabilities with data science methods to:

  • Drive better outcomes through leveraging state of the art innovation and increasing lab efficiency 
  • Incorporate sustainability goals into designs  and processes
  • Integrate quality and regulatory needs through collaboration
  • Boost operational efficiency while staying agile and ahead of the competition

As an effective science-based solution, the platform makes end-to-end collaboration easy in order to build advanced multi-scale simulation models for virtual experiments and to democratize workflow. 

By conducting virtual experimentation on the platform, companies can explore and secure new sustainable ingredients. The platform also leverages green chemistry – where no real chemicals are used in the process but are instead experimented with virtually to avoid waste. This practice leads to a reduced number of real experiments to perform. For example, researchers only need to test 5 or 10 experiments in the real world out of 2,000 virtual experiments, which saves a lot of time, money and ingredients. This makes the lab much more productive and clearly benefits the company in the process.

EXPERIENCE THE DIGITAL MAKEOVER

On the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, companies can step into the future confidently by using new emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, machine learning and more. When a platform is supported by 40 years of deep expertise and solid global experience, companies gain the following benefits:

1.Data-Driven Innovation

With the vast amount of data, a challenge emerges to capture, manage and make sense of it.  

"Can the 3DEXPERIENCE platform handle all of your data? The answer is yes. It is designed to handle all forms of data – and handle them well. This includes structured and unstructured data, static and dynamic image data, proteomics data and even polymeric structural data."

While most machine learning capabilities to analyze data are built in a siloed fashion, the right platform integrates systems across the entire organization – connecting different teams and geographical locations end to end – to capture and process historical and real-time data in various formats on a single platform.

Providing a connected view of a product’s complete lifecycle, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform turns data into actionable insights so companies can:  

  • Innovate better with advanced science and data-driven decisions to accurately manage production requirements and optimize productions
  • Achieve lab efficiency and accelerate breakthrough scientific discoveries
  • Model and simulate formulation designs and process conditions to increase first-time-right success rates for new formulations, products and packaging through a model-first approach
  • Predict product shelf life and different properties such as skin penetration and moisture retention through advanced simulation and formulation design capabilities
  • Improve usage experience by predicting product shelf life and transport and mechanical properties

"A connected beauty system is one way to merge beauty products, health and technology. Imagine developing an app where a skin photo can be submitted to an AI model that will suggest the best moisturizing skincare product, not only based on the specific skin condition but also the humidity and temperature at that location."

2. Smart and Sustainable Designs

Making eco-friendly ingredients and formulations accessible to all stakeholders in real time on one central repository system helps accelerate the incorporation of new green ingredients and materials into the reformulation process to improve product development. 

Through digitalization, companies can map the entire product journey with accurate insights on ingredients, supply origins and packaging materials to form a transparent supply chain. This enhances traceability through a single source of truth  on the platform, which is highly crucial in providing safe, sustainable and high-quality products.

The platform delivers unparalleled speed and reliability, too. For example, a formulator can share data with different teams with a single click from a research laboratory in the US to a marketing office in Singapore – surpassing both time and geographical constraints. Data, such as consumer data pulled from various integrated systems, contributes as a reliable truth source when designing better personalized, wholesome products that harmonize beauty and healthcare to elevate consumer experiences.

3. Quality and Regulatory Management System

Quality is paramount in the beauty and personal care industries. Having disconnected systems that are document and process-centric often means incomplete audit trail and quality issues cannot be rectified automatically. On the other hand, an effective closed-loop quality management system on a digital platform quickly identifies and records non-conformance for processes and products that fail to meet quality benchmarks. This is vital as any isolated event could potentially lead to product recalls, eroding consumer trust.

By streamlining processes on the platform, companies gain foresight and flexibility to optimize quality management systems, maintain high-quality standards across plants and anticipate any quality-related issues. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform uniquely incorporates various algorithms from multiple sources in a single environment to deliver predictive capabilities to better monitor quality, detect anomalies and keep machines and equipment running at peak performance. 

A better audit system can also be created by leveraging full visibility and real-time output of KPIs and reports to ensure adherence to quality standards and regulations. Laboratoires M&L, the manufacturing division of L’Occitane Group, utilizes the technology to manage on-site production, quality, product data and material movement. The company then gains product traceability and quality assurance resulting in swifter responses, accelerated product innovation and minimal to zero downtime, even during audit activities.

"Within an organization, every function is dependent on several others. And all of them are critical to operational efficiency. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform brings together the entire organization to increase collaboration, accelerate innovation and improve execution. That’s why it’s such a powerful platform."

LEAD THE INDUSTRY TRANSFORMATION

New green active ingredients and formulations are what consumers want and imperative to businesses in the industry. Developing them right requires a combination of advanced technology, skilled expertise in research and development and an efficient laboratory environment.  

Laboratory and manufacturing solutions from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform are an ideal way to boost creativity and bring innovations to the market faster. It enables market leaders to: 

  • Rapidly process large amounts of data leveraging molecular level scientific know-how
  • Collaborate and improve decision making through automated data analyses from multiple research areas
  • Facilitate continuous exploring, visualizing and reporting of research results in one digital environment

These advancements turn new formulations into new consumer experiences that create long-term business value.

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